Christchurch Ruby

Mar 19, 2026 Beyond Vibe: Inference for Fun and Profit

7:30pm · Saltworks, 4 Ash Street, Christchurch

Our scheduled speaker Dan has had to reshedule, so, this month we have the wonderful Daniel Fone to talk to us about the topic of our times - LLMs. Love them or loathe them, they are here to stay, so best to understand them & learn how to leverage them.

Somewhere around the end of last year, frontier LLMs seem to have taken an evolutionary leap. I want to explore how state-of-the-art coding agents evolved from their humble complete-the-prompt GPT ancestors. I’ll try to explain the key concepts and technology (no maths!) and illustrate each step with practical examples from my personal, real-world experience. Finally, I’ll show how I use coding agents to get stuff done in a world where code is free and accuracy is scarce. Also this…

“Daniel, Just got my monthly bill. Our typical monthly bill is $80 to $100, and February came in a bit over $50000000000000. Are you able to see if anything is going on, or whether that’s related to any of that new AI stuff we’re doing?”